Deciding what to include in your book can be mean more than just the words.

All too often we talk to people bogged down trying to include images, charts, checklists, and screenshots in their book.

As with everything, there is a right way and a wrong way to approach this, so in today’s show we’re taking a little time to talk about the pros and cons of including images.

We’ll look at the constraints you need to be aware of, some tips to better use the additional information you’re trying to include, and the best way to think about the context in which your book will be read.

The aim, as always, is to help you get your best book out there as fast as possible, without getting caught up in all the image pitfalls.

And… we finish off the show with a quick look at the outlining tools we use to map out our content

Book Blueprint Scorecard

Don't forget, you can see how your book idea stacks up against the Book Blueprint by going to BookBlueprintScore.com and, if you want to be a guest on the show to plan your successful book, just head over to 90MinuteBooks.com/guest

Transcript: Book More Show 062

Stuart: Hey, welcome to another episode of the Book More Show. It's Stuart here with Betsey Vaughn. Betsey, how are you doing?

Betsey: I am great, Stuart Bell. Good to be here.

Stuart: Good, good. This is actually the third time that we've pressed start on this recording today. As you can tell, I've got a bit of a croaky voice. Hopefully, I'm not going to cough too much during this episode, and people can still make sense of what we're saying, or what I'm saying, at least.

Betsey: I will say, welcome to the US. For those of you who've been listening to us, Stuart has been based in the UK for the past couple of years, and so this is our first recording with us in the same country. We've yet to do one in the same state, but we are at least in the same country, so welcome.

Stuart: Thank you, it's good to be here. Slow progress. 3,000 miles closer, I just need to close the last 700 or so.

Betsey: Right, exactly.

Stuart: It's good. That's why, actually, we had a bit of a hiatus in the show last week, because with moving and everything, it was just too much to try, and we didn't have time to get a show in, unfortunately. Hopefully, we're on a good schedule now, and we can share some great stuff over the summer.

Betsey: Very good. I'm looking forward to it. What are we going to talk about today?

Stuart: Today, I thought we would talk about what to include in a book. Two reasons for thinking about it, one because I've had a couple of calls this last week where people were talking about wanting to read various different things, a couple of strategy calls just talking about how or what to include, and then the second reason that brought it to mind is we've just tweaked the product mix slightly.

Historically, the Pro version of the book, as people head over to the Get Started page, we've got three options to choose from. The Pro version of the book included some images already, we've just extended that down to the Plus range, as well, the middle tier, so that by default now includes a couple of images. We thought it was a good time to talk about, briefly, why we did that, what to include, what not to include, and just generally how to think about going around structuring the content or bringing the content together, at least.

Betsey: Okay, very good. Looking forward to it.

Stuart: Perfect. As I said, I'm going to try and mute when I'm going to cough in the middle of this. If I suddenly go quiet, that might be why. We'll see how it goes.

Where to start? Probably with things that we most often get asked about in terms of including other content, not just text or words. Some of the common things that people are thinking about are images, but then that extends to slides, screenshots, charts, graphs, and all that type of thing. I can't think of anything else. Can you think of any other content types that people often talk about?

Betsey: No. I'm sure something will come to me, but right this second, yeah-

Stuart: Slides are probably the most random one that comes up, so we'll mention those ones particularly, but I think that covers it. Basically, the way we tend to address it is thinking about what adds to the narrative, adds to the journey that people are going from the front page to the last page, but not get distracted with adding things for the sake of adding them.

There's a couple of constraints when you're thinking about adding images. This goes for whether you're working with us or whether you're doing this by yourself. That really is the page dimensions, the constraints of the page dimensions, and then the constraints of the quality of the image as well. As you're looking to add something on screen, you're seeing it typically at 72 dpi, 72 dots per inch. Depending on the screen resolution you've got on your machine, it might be cranked up, but typically, when people are adding images to a website, it's around about that.

For print quality, most printers are asking for something around 300 dpi. You don't need to worry too much about what those numbers actually mean, dpi stands for dots per inch if you're interested, but just that difference between 72 and 300, you see that for print quality, you want a much higher resolution image, and that's because it has to put the ink on the page in a sharp enough and crisp enough way that it makes sense when it's printed. If you've got too low a resolution image, then it just kind of gets ... it's blurry, or pixelated would maybe another way to think about it. There's lots of other constraints that come into it as well, so the paper quality, the nature of the printing itself, the provider you've got.

Text is pretty straightforward. One character looks very much like another character. Unless you're really pushing the edges of the envelope, you don't really have to think about text as it's on the page, in the PDF file, when you send it to be printed. As soon as you start getting into images, then these other constraints do spring up. That just adds complexity, it adds time and complication, and ultimately, cost and delay to the project you're trying to get out the door. It's definitely a case to think about having no images to start with and then only adding images that further the conversation, further the discussion, illuminate or illustrate the point you're trying to make more, and move people further and faster towards the call to action at the back.

With a webpage as an example, it's slightly different, because the overheads of putting an image on a webpage are far less, because there are fewer confounding factors, there are fewer things that can cause a problem with it. In a print version, it's oftentimes that less is more. I know that some people think about just adding as many as possible because they just want to ... they come from the perspective of more is more. I know you have quite a few conversations with people like that, talking about adding images, ask them how many they've got, and then they come back with 20, 30, 40 images that they want to include.

Betsey: Yeah. When you look at the book, it takes it from being a clean, easy read to ... it can really junk up, for lack of a better term, a book very quickly if it's not done right. Throwing images in to throw them in ... I think sometimes people do it to beef up the amount of pages, it pushes that out. We're pretty good, I think, here about saying, "Hey, if you don't really need it, let's condense it. If it's not pertinent to the actual story or really to the examples, if it's not needed, then let's not do it."

We've had some individuals that have approached us with 24, 25, 30 images, and then it becomes a picture book, for lack of a better term there, too. It's not really needed. If it's not going to be good quality, then ... We've spent a little time sometimes with these individuals on their images, and our design team is incredible about working with them, but still, if it's not going to be exactly what you need, it's not worth doing, in my opinion.

Stuart: Exactly. I think that quality is a good thing to dive into a little bit more. We talked about the constraints on the page, how the actual ink flows onto the paper, and the technical constraints around that, but also in terms of the nature of the image, quite a few times we've seen clip-arty type images, or a really random set of images that don't necessarily tie things together. If it is something that you need to include, and you feel that it does add value, there is something to be said for having consistency through the set. Again, that adds constraints, cost, and time to it, because now you're trying to look for a consistent set of images, and you might get 80 percent of the way there, but not all the way there. It might then distract or detract more than it adds. Where possible, if you are going to include images, include something that's stylistically consistent, so there's a theme-

Betsey: That is a very good point, yes.

Stuart: We were talking just before we started recording yesterday, Betsey was talking to some real estate guys, and they were referring to someone that stages houses ready for them to sell. There's another book that we're just completing, similar message, and the before and after pictures in those books, or the before and after work their house stager does, a lot of it is around consistency and having images that are similarly ... that are taken in a similar way, they're lit in a similar way, they have, maybe, a consistent color theme throughout the house. You can really see just from ... forget about a book, but just from a design perspective, you can see something that is very consistent and stylistically similar looks a lot more pleasing, professional, and considered, than something where it's a whole load of haphazard stuff brought together.

Betsey: Yeah. We have a great example right now of a book that we're in the very early stages of. It's a book on elder care, great author. We're hoping to get Sandy Cooper on one of the podcasts, because she's just a really dynamic personality, and I've enjoyed our conversations. She has had a designer, somebody on her team, do ... I've mentioned this to you, these images, these stick figure images. She's copyrighted them and everything. They're just great work. That's what she's using throughout the book.

She had a whole slew of them, something like 40 of them, but she said, "I'm going to use like 10." She already knows that she doesn't need to use all of them. It's a consistent look, there's consistent color, and it's going to look good throughout the book because it's going to be that same theme. I've already seen the images, but I'm excited to see how the placement goes and how it ends up looking in the book, for sure.

Stuart: You mentioned one thing in that ... when talking about Sandy there, and that's copyright on images, as well. That's another problem that we run into quite often. Again, as I say, whether you're doing this yourself or whether you're working with us, if you're working with us, any images that you send to us, we ask you to confirm that you've got the correct permissions or copyright to use those images. Quite often, we'll see people come through with screenshots taken from something, or artwork downloaded from a website somewhere. You can really run into problems if you don't have sufficient or the correct permissions to use images in print publications.

Quite often, some stock image sites like Getty Images, iStock, or Can Stock will have ... Their licenses vary, so we'll always check, but quite often, the standard licenses will be adequate for images used in a print project up to maybe half a million impressions. For most people, in the context that we're talking about, it's very unlikely that you're going to exceed that number of print impressions for a book. We're not talking about selling millions, we're talking about using it in marketing funnels. The volumes are typically much lower.

It is the case that for a relatively cost-effective amount, you can buy images with the correct licenses that you can use it in the way that you want to use it, but certainly, just taking images from the web because it's there is something that you need to be very careful of. We've passed that message back to quite a few people just to make sure that they're not opening themselves up for problems further down the track.

Betsey: We run into that a lot. We deal with a lot of, as people might know, a lot of financial clients, so people will send us what is public record, public tax information or insurance information that obviously, you can find anywhere. They'll send us a snapshot of something they've found some place, and yes, that information is public record, but that image that they've taken from someone else's website, it's not. I'm like, "Yes, you can present us with the information, it's that image." Sometimes they just don't understand the difference.

Stuart: It's a good point, isn't it? Just because the underlying data is public record, the work to create that asset, that chart, image, table or infographic, that's still copyrighted work of the person that created it in the first place. It's very easy to fall foul of that. It's not something that people always think about, the people interpret that a little bit too freely sometimes.

Betsey: Absolutely.

Stuart: Charts is a good one to move onto, charts and tables. We've talked about the print quality constraints. We need high-res images in order to print in a way that makes sense. Actually, just before we move on, the other thing to bear in mind, as well, is that color books versus black-and-white books, the cost jumps significantly from one to the other. Color is typically three to four times more expensive, even on standard paper stock. An image that looks good in the PDF version where the color contrast isn't ... the colors are too similar, or too close, or the image when it's on the page is too small, the blacks, dark blues and grays all start to blur into each other, you don't get that definition. That's another element to consider, as well.

Another reason why, really for the overhead, particularly for the early versions of the books where most people, as we're talking to people, this whole premise of getting something out there to the market to test in there, the lean model of get something out there and see what the feedback is, see how it resonates, see if the whole concept of the book, the funnel that you're trying to follow through on is the right one to invest further time and money on, so those early versions ... Again, don't delay. Don't waste the time.

Having a book with no images out there three months earlier is far better than waiting, testing, and spending all of the additional money ... Sorry, it's far better than waiting and spending additional time and money to get it there before you've tested. This is always something you can add to later. If you get feedback that something's ambiguous or you feel that an image would enhance it. Again, it can be a false economy to add all of these things up front when it's perhaps better to wait and do it later.

Charts and tables, that's what I was going to talk about. The physical book, and again, I don't know whether this is because people tend to think of things from a screen-based perspective, so even looking at a document on a screen, being able to zoom into it gives a kind of false equivalency to the actual physical size of the page when it's printed and in your hand. A book that's 8x5 with a spine and a border around the text area, that actual area of space, particularly width-wise ... There isn't that much space.

Sometimes, we'll see people wanting to squeeze charts and tables in there that are very wide. Once you start reducing them down to fit on a physical page, actually, they become pretty illegible. Charts have a tendency of merging together, particularly if you've got many chart lines or data points on there, they can become quite difficult to read. A colored background on the screen sometimes makes things easier to discern, but typically, a colored background on a chart in a book doesn't work well. That kind of very lightly graded background just really pixelates when it's printed, because you only get a couple of dots per inch to get the color going, and it just looks more confusing.

Charts, on the other hand, it's not so much a background issue, but you get many columns of small numbers, and it really merges together. A better way of doing it ... if you're working with us and we're doing it, we'll typically suggest that the chart is spun sideways so that it has more width, but then, of course, the height is limited. Manipulating charts over various pages doesn't necessarily work because of the physical constraints, and then you lose the thread of what it's trying to display. All of these practical constraints are why it's perhaps more trouble than it's worth.

An option to overcome that is to provide that data ... if that data's important, provide that a little bit further down the funnel. We've often talked, and this is really the key thing about what to include, is about the context, how someone's receiving the book, and how you want to use it in the context of a broader funnel. If the book was a traditional fiction book and the product was the book itself, then it makes sense to include all of these things in it, because the book is the product. Here, there's virtually no circumstance where we say the book is the product. The book is always leading an introduction to the product further down the line.

With that in mind, there's always an opportunity to provide this additional detail in either an email follow-up sequence, a webpage specifically set up to it, or a bonus download section of another PDF that you can offer people to download, all these ways that you can include exactly the same information but in another step, another stage in the journey from getting someone to raise their hand because they're broadly interested in the subject down to specifically doing business with you because they see you as the answer to the problem that they're trying to solve.

Trying to stuff all of it into the pages of a book is often not the best choice. If you're trying to build on the relationship, develop the relationship, and have the opportunity to have multiple touchpoints with that person, then including this additional content at a later stage is a way to present a plan.

Every time you send an email saying, "Hey, Betsey, wanted to follow up with you, I've just got off the call with someone talking about chapter 7, there was a particular point about this chart, table, or whatever it is that I want to include. I just got off the call talking about this particular chapter. In the conversation, we realized it would be fantastic if the person could see the data that we were talking about, so here's a link to the chart, here's a link to the table, here's a link to a video walkthrough that I did that explains this in a little bit more detail." Whatever that funnel opportunity is to follow through and to present them with another email with another touchpoint adding additional value, then including it off the page rather than on the page is an option.

The other alternative, we've talked previously about the back cover copy and how, ideally, you'll have three steps to lead people to the next step. The first step, the minimum viable commitment or zero-commitment one of, "Here's some additional resources, go and check out these videos on our page. To learn more about this, check out these articles we've got written on the site, or blog posts." Number two, then, follow up and complete the assessment, the thing that really starts you moving forward, and then number three, start working with us.

That first step of, "This has been interesting, we want to learn more," then we provide this particular bonus information at this particular domain, URL, or place where they can go and get all of this additional information, and it's just really a way of adding value, in a more practical way, as well, to be honest. Rather than trying to add everything in the pages, just add all that additional stuff in a different place in a way that makes it seem like you've given them two things rather than just one thing.

Stuart: Exactly. It serves two purposes. Not only is it giving the perception of delivering more, having two touchpoints rather than one touchpoint, it's actually delivering something that's more valuable in a better context. I think that context conversation is one that gets lost a lot. We so often think about the thing and don't think about the context of the thing. I remember talking about this in some of the earlier podcasts, this context question of how are people receiving it?

If 99 percent of the people who are receiving this thing are receiving it as a PDF version, not actually the physical book, then to a certain degree, the conversation changes, because you know that almost all of the audience is reading it in a PDF form, and therefore it's more of a visual aspect than a physical aspect. If you know that every single person is only ever going to read it in a physical sense, it changes the context, changes the dynamic. If they're in a situation where they're never going to be able to download something, in this day and age, I can't think of a reason why that might be, but if they're never going to be able to follow through and get some action somewhere else, then potentially, having a digital download is no use and you have to include it up-front, because again, the context of how they're receiving it.

Some of the other things that change that thought process are things around GDPR, now, in Europe. Being able to follow-up with people after the fact is potentially a challenge because of the new opt-in requirements. I don't want to get into that conversation here, because it's really not something we're an expert in, but if you have to explicitly ask people if you can follow up with them by email, if you position the book, the digital download, rather than just giving them the option to download it, click here, and that's it, if you position it as, "Here's the book download, as part of this download, we'll follow up with a series of seven emails that provide the additional information that wouldn't actually fit into the book and state that up front," that might be a good, valid way to overcome the requirements to get people to specifically opt into the mail that you're going to be sending them.

Rather than just assuming that "Okay, we now need explicit opt-in for everything, and we're just not going to do it," think about ways of structuring it that means that you are compliant, but also gives the opportunity to send people follow-up content in a meaningful way relating to the specific thing that they have opted in for.

Including some of these extra, additional things in that sequence is a good reason for people to opt in, and it's a good reason for you to be able to send them at least seven emails as part of the cycle, as part of this specific thing they've opted in for, rather than just having an open-ended, "We want to send you this, and then we want to send you an open-ended number of follow-ups," because it's not around a specific funnel. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but-

Betsey: That's great information.

Stuart: I think that was the first cough so far. Excuse me. Where did we get up to? We've talked about what to include and the constraints. As mentioned, if you are working with us, we'll be able to guide you through quite a lot of this anyway and point out any pitfalls. We talked about the context of how people are receiving it, so think about how they're actually ... the reader's not just the asset by itself, but think about the readers and how they're dealing with it. We talked about the physical constraints, particularly around dimensions and quality, that type of thing.

Really, the key thing we want to get across is, get the book out there. Anything that you can do to minimize that path to get it out of the door to make it easier, quicker, faster, cheaper ... because all of these things can be updated, tweaked, and added to later. It's really not worth spending thousands of extra dollars or months of extra time adding these things when really, you want to wait for specific feedback. If you do make the decision to include them, then think about that consistency of images, permissions, the kind of less-is-more type of approach of not just putting it into a picture book or comic. Whether you're doing this with us or whether you're doing it by yourself, I think all of those constraints are worthwhile things to think about.

Betsey: Excellent.

Stuart: Excuse me. The other thing I wanted to quickly touch on while we're talking about what to include is, a few people have asked me when we've been on some strategy calls, based on some things that I mentioned in the past, and that's the outlining and how to bring the ideas together to structure the content a little bit. I just wanted to briefly touch on some of the things that I do, mainly because some people have been asking, but hopefully people get value from it.

When I'm outlining anything, whether it's one of the books that we do, one of the calls or training sessions, or to a lesser degree, the strategy calls, but anything that I'm thinking ahead, I'm always mind mapping, because I find it very easy to graphically lay these things out in a graphical but still hierarchical way. I know some people are less into mind maps and are more into traditional outline.

The tool that I use all the time is one called iThoughts HD. It's an iPad and Mac app. The reason I like that particularly, it's a mind-mapping tool, but it's got keyboard shortcuts for creating child and sibling levels. As you're typing, if you hit space bar three times, it will put a child in and automatically jump to the next level down, and if you enter, or return, three times, it will put a sibling in, so the next one on the same level. That really quickly enables me to keep typing as I'm thinking about the different levels, get it all in, put some structure in at the first pass, and then kind of grab things with the mouse, or touch them on the iPad, and move things around if I want to restructure the order.

For me, that's a super straightforward way of starting off at the table of contents level, at the main questions that we want to answer, the main section headings, and then fleshing them out or expanding them down into the sub-areas to make sure that each level is talked about. When I come to record and create the book in the actual recording, I can just use the mind map and highlight each of the nodes one at a time, and then make sure that as I'm talking, I'm ticking off the things that I've predefined and know that I want to cover as I'm going through them. Are you a mind map person, an outline person, or a sketch in a notepad person?

Betsey: I'm not. I think I probably should be. I'm a messy notebook writer kind of person. I'm not. I really should be, though. I'm going to work on that.

Stuart: I know that it's definitely ... even as people are listening to this, I think you know what your preferences are to a certain degree, and whether it's sketch noting and doing images and illustrations to take you from one level to the next, whether it's traditional hierarchical outlining, just kind of like bulleted and sub-bulleted lists, or whether it's mind maps, I think you gravitate to one or the other. Even before the tools were around, so going back 10 years, the physical or paper-based mind mapping, I would typically do that anyway, so draw a circle in the center of the page and then spread out from there.

Having said that, I guess maybe in the paper sense, I tend to use bulleted lists a little bit more. It gets messy, so I much prefer the ability to do it on a system. As I say, other systems might do it as well, but I thought the fact that you can just keep typing and it will put the structure in by hitting the triple space or the triple return, that's really the thing that makes it very fast and quick to get it in there, and then you can play around with it later. You don't need to spend money on tools like that. Outlining it on paper, in Excel, or ... I know OmniOutliner, I think it's relatively pricey, but that's a very robust hierarchical outlining tool, as well, that I know people are very keen on.

Particularly when you're thinking about books, and as we've talked about before, if you head back to one of the book blueprint scorecard stages when we were talking about creating meaningful content, and that outline, in effect, that the title is really the problem statement, it catches their attention, it draws people to it, the subheading amplifies that and then develops the thought a little bit more and reinforces it, and then the next thing is really the table of contents, people opening that front cover, looking at the table of contents, seeing the chapter headings that kind of tell a story going from that problem to a solution.

Mind mapping or outlining that to start with, start with the title, and then going to those chapter headings, and then just fleshing out the chapter headings into the content that needs to be there to support it, I think that makes it very easy when you then come back to the call and you've got the opportunity to just go on each node, one at a time, and just make sure that you are covering all the bases that you've thought about that you've taken some time to sit down and think about what should be included in the outline and then what information is actually needed within that outline to really flesh it out.

With that, yeah, I think that is a good place to draw a line under it. I was just looking down ... talking about the outlining, I was just looking down the list that I jotted down before we jumped on the call. The only other one I noticed on there that we didn't particularly cover in terms of what to include were checklists. The reason I want to quickly mention that separately is checklists provide something slightly different to images, because they're more interactive. There's the assumption or suggestion with a checklist that someone actually plays along at home and fills it in as they're going. We've seen two types of checklist come through from people. Without wanting to be judgey, I'll call them good checklists and bad checklists.

The good ones are exactly that. They're ones where the context has been considered, the place that they sit in the chapter is very clearly supporting the information that's just been said. It might be talking about financial planners, we were talking about financial planners before, so people refinancing mortgages. There are probably seven or eight things that you need to know before you jump on a call with a mortgage broker or go to Rocket Mortgage or one of the online services, and that's perhaps things like outstanding value of the home, outstanding mortgage, maybe your credit score, how much debt you're carrying, what other bills you've got.

Those specific things where people can fill in the blanks and feel like they're reinforcing the message that they've just read, or it adds value to them because they can collectively bring this useful information together in one place and then refer back to it at a later date, so sticking with the refinancing example, giving someone a checklist on the page that really gives them the seven or eight things that are going to be super valuable before they jump on a call with any provider, that's a good checklist. It's adding value.

Some of the bad checklists that we see are things like slides from a presentation that people have done that have some questions on there, or slightly random questions that don't necessarily tie in completely with the chapter that's just come before it, it's just reusing content from elsewhere that isn't entirely contextually relevant, or ... We saw one, I can't think of what it was specifically, but it was where there was a whole host of pretty complicated calculations. There was an A plus B minus C then divide that answer by 23, pat your head, pick your nose, and you'll end up with a number. That type of thing really would be better served with a link out to a website with a form that people can just enter their details onto the form and then the number gets spit out for them.

Anything that's too complicated by that is very ... not very challenging, but it's not the most useful and the most relevant to be in a book. There are plenty of online form providers out there. We use JotForm quite a lot here, but I know there's several others where you could just put a link ... You can even put an image to the form, to the checklist where people would put those complicated numbers, maybe jazz it up a little bit so it looked compelling, but have an image to the form and then a big URL to the dedicated landing page below, www.migratecalculation.com, and head over there and put in the details, and point people in that direction, rather than trying to do something too complicated in the book just because you're trying to reuse information that lives usefully elsewhere, and now you're trying to dump it into a page because you're not necessarily thinking about the best context for.

Checklists, just wanted to touch on that before we wrap up, because that one is a useful one, and it's one where people sometimes fall on the bad side of the fence.

Betsey: Very good, yeah.

Stuart: All righty. I can feel another cough coming on, so let's wrap it up before that comes spluttering down the mic. As you listen to this podcast, as always head over to 90minutebooks.com/podcast. This is going to be episode 62, so dive in there for the show notes, the transcript, and listen along again. If you've got any questions, you want us to address anything on the show, if you want to be a guest, head over to 90minutebooks.com/podcast and follow the guest link. We're going to get some guests scheduled in over the summer. Questions? Just shoot a note to support at 90minutebooks and we'll pick those up. If it's specifically for the podcast, let us know, and we'll answer the question there. If you've just got a question for us, again, we'll pick those up and reply directly.

As you said, the best thing you can do is just jump on board and get started. As always, if you want our help, just head over to 90minutebooks.com and follow the Get Started link. We'll be there to guide you through the process and help you make the right call on including images and, more importantly, getting your book out there, talking to new prospective leads.

Betsey: Very good.

Stuart: Thank you, Betsey. Thank you, everyone that's listening. We will catch you in the next one.